Electric cars

[Ed Heron]

Anybody interested in converting an existing vehicle to electric?

I have apartially converted VW and a couple of books.

[Aaron]

Hi Ed!

I let my batteries dry out when my Solectria died.
I need to see if they can be revived enough to enable the controller.
(The controller will not activate unless is sees something near 144v)

I'll get out there, water them, float them, and see how many survive.
I may want to borrow a few to see if I can get this car going again.

There is a guy named Dale in Rio Rancho, who seems to have a motorcycle business, who is building an electric bike. He knows Victor's son(s?), who also have electric bikes.

What do you need to do next on the VW?
Was it welding?

aaron

[Ed Heron]

I don't have any batteries anymore. I got an old set from somebody but they had gone dry and I brought them to recycling.

Yes, the next step is to make battery boxes.

[Matt Grommes]

Have either of you guys seen the show Invention Nation (I think on the Discovery Channel)? They did an episode here in NM and one of the people they visited was a guy in Santa Fe who does electric car conversions. I'll try to find who he was but he might make a good resource for your project.

[Ed Heron]

There's actually a guy doing conversions in NM? Wow. There used to be a electric car club in ABQ, but it kind of dissipated

[Matt Grommes]

I'll find the site for that show, it was very interesting. They went out to the Earthship houses and one other thing in NM, if I remember correctly.

[Aaron]

There is a guy in RR doing electric motorcycles. Dale Henderson, of Henderson Cycles.
Contact:

hendersonmotorcycles _circle_a_ yahoo _dot_ com

[Pharaoh]

I had read a bit on how to convert a vehicle to Electric power. Though I don't have an extra vehicle to conver over. I would be interrested in seeing what you've done and what your experiences are, (mileage and all that) and what ideas you have to perhaps improve your design, and of course some errata on what we could hopefully avoid in building our own.

Eric

[Ed Heron]

Victor would be the guy to involve in that discussion. If we all don't mind going to RR, I could probably set something up at his shop to see his (and his family's) electric vehicles.

[Pharaoh]

Hmm how arou Prius Batteries, Has anyone tried getting a prius battery set and trying to use that I wonder. it might merit some research.

[Aaron]

They use a small NiMH set, as I recall, with a very, very complicated monitoring system.
Unfortunately, they seem to be rather un-suited to re-purposing.
If Ed and/or Tony are still reading the EV list, they may have more current information.
BTW: Range on Prius batteries would be about 4 miles anyway. Unless you parallelled
a dozen packs of them or so, they would be not much help.

Last I heard, NiMH has a self-discharge problem. They are good for quick re-gen daily
use, but less effecient if you want them to HOLD a charge.
They are great for RC planes (I have many), but even there LiPo is becoming very
common, affordable, with good power density.

If Tony joins this group (I invited him), he may comment on the state of newer Li technologies. They are getting more common.
Many high-end electric car prototypes are using huge banks of laptop batteries.
Tony just got some Chinese Li modules, that seemed to have some sort
of battery management system (BMS) which is critical for Li, since they
can catch fire... and it is a really, really, nasty fire. In fact, I bet water would
FUEL those fires with O2.

Li, traditionally, has great energy density (J/kg), but a problem with power density
(peak W/kg). AFAIK, many electric race cars still prefer PbA for this reason.
High currents from lead batteries is a very mature use-case.

I'm not exactly sure why interest is waning from NiMH or NiCd.
I guess if Li costs are similar or less, Li is preferred, even if it is more dangerous (fire).

[Ed Heron]

I haven't been keeping up with other electric car lists.

However, I'm barely going to have money for traditional lead acid batteries, so I wouldn't consider other technologies because they are all so much more expensive.

Also, the golf cart battery size is a standard, so it makes a lot of sense to design for that size battery.

As far as taking batteries from another application, remember that hybrids don't go very fast before they start the motor and are constantly charging. The state of hybrids is such that super caps would be better.

[Aaron]

Take a look at my new forum post on the MAKE controller board.
I know what I want my first project to be...

Use CAN bus, with some opto-isolated circuits, to monitor module voltage on
a string of batteries. Once we have that on the MAKE controller, one
could publish the info via ethernet, provide a data server, a WWW server, or
find a way to push the data around on USB.

I like the idea of bypassing all the "simple" technology and going straight to ethernet.
I bet I can pick up some sort of a palmtop and program a display a lot cheaper
than it would be for me to find a way to drive a typical, simple LCD strip display.